‘The making of a good mix tape is a very subtle art. You’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.’
– Rob Gordon (John Cusack), from the movie High Fidelity.
i’d been trying to make a special mix cd for my wife, kirsten, for months now. even years. you would think that something like this shouldn’t take that long. but for me, it has.
i wondered why. i mean, i had made mix cd’s for other friends over the years. and while it does take intentional time and thought and creativity, it’s not like i was writing a novel or a symphony. if anything, it was more like writing a blog entry. it involves all the aforementioned things, but at least for me, it also comes out pretty quickly. and i like that kind of spontaneity in expression. (it’s probably why i love jazz so much.)
but for this creation, i pondered and searched and compiled and arranged and re-arranged and edited and re-edited the order of songs countless times, trying to find just the right flow, the perfect combination of other peoples’ poetry to express my own feelings.
i’d love to say that i found it. but in the end, what i had to work with was about 78 minutes worth of space per cd, and songs that were not written by me for her or us. and like composing ‘found’ poetry, what you end up with is not nearly ‘perfection’ but, hopefully, ‘reflections’ of experiences that have shaped you and the one with whom you have traveled significant parts of your life’s journey.
what i ended up with was a ragtag collection of pieces that evoke certain memories and feelings from the past, expressed in the present with gratitude and love in hope for the future.
what i made for her was a ‘trilogy’ of cd’s…one remembering the ‘giddy’ early years, one reflecting the joys and challenges of facing ‘real life’ together, and one expressing thankfulness for a love grounded in that lived reality.
(they are NOT all in d minor, ‘the saddest of all keys’, as nigel tufnel so astutely observed in This is Spinal Tap)
as i listen to the collection now, what strikes me is not so much the end product, but what the process of compiling and creating it revealed to me.
kir and i have been married for almost 20 years now. and we’ve known each other much longer than that (since we were 8 years old…do the math and it adds up to 37 years). that’s A LOT of years and even MORE memories. so many laughs and smiles, tears and sighs, knowing glances and reckless dances, inside jokes and friendly pokes, receding hairlines and expanding waistlines, harrowing diagnoses and perplexing quandaries, unmet expectations and anguished revelations, miraculous healings and maturing feelings, glimpses of infinity and doses of reality.
and through it all, a friendship i couldn’t have invented if i were the inventor of friendship.
and a love that embraces all that’s frail and all that’s real, and transcends both of us.
it’s been quite a journey thus far. and as i looked back through all that we have traveled through – as individuals and as a couple, the moments of peace and pain, what has shocked and shaped us – i realized that so much of it came from forces around us as well as within us, people whose words and actions encouraged, challenged and inspired us, circumstances that surprised, frightened and delighted us. most of the significant substance of our journey was not our own creation ex nihilo, but rather, a mixture of elements that we discovered (or that discovered us) formed into something that is certainly not ‘perfect’, but is definitely more scandalously beautiful, preposterously eloquent, and transcendently powerful than either of us could have created on our own.
like ‘found’ poetry. or a finely crafted mix cd. allowing the words, actions, experiences of others on their journeys to become a means of shaping and expressing our own journey.
a journey we couldn’t have invented, even if we were the Inventor of journeys.
a Love that embraces all that’s frail and all that’s real, and transcends all of us.